Ah, TCL, the Tool Command Language. Based on the research conducted by myself and my colleagues here at Security Objectives (most notably Shane Macaulay,) we have concluded that Tcl has a multitude of security issues, especially when being used in a network environment; and contemporarily speaking, network usage is almost unavoidable. In essence, we are urging the use of extreme caution in Tcl-based web development–whether it’s being used directly or indirectly. To generalize, we also advise against using Tcl for any network application or protocol (not just HTTP.) Security Objectives has published an in-depth analysis of practical Tcl vulnerabilities. The whitepaper, entitled “Tickling CGI Problems”, outlines the theoretical backbone of the phenomena in the first half and presents cases of real-world exploitation in the second half. However, the background theory along with some general programming and Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol knowledge is recommended in order to gain a firm understanding of the exploits themselves.

This is not to say that Tcl should not be used ever, so as a disclaimer we are not advocating any programming language over another. Our position is that the traditional approach to web security with Tcl has much room for improvement. Like any other programming language it works nicely in certain areas such as academic research, scientific computing, extensions, and software testing. With that being said, one project that comes to mind is regfuzz, a regular expression fuzzer written in Tcl which is quite useful. The distinction here is that regfuzz is not intended to be exposed to a public (or even a private) network. Surely, Safe-Tcl could successfully serve network clients in a hardened production environment given that assessed risks were rated low enough to suffice as acceptable. The problem is, that’s not the type of operations that occur in practice as evidenced by an overwhelming majority of cases.

The vulnerabilities exposed by the whitepaper affect TclHttpd, Lyris List Manager, cgi.tcl (which also uses Expect) as well as the Tcl language itself and interpreters thereof. Some of the attack methodologies and vulnerabilities identified are new to the public. Others are similar to well-known attacks or simply subversions of previous security patches, e.g. CVE-2005-4147. As time unfolds, there will surely be a surge in publicized Tcl weaknesses due to the research which is elaborated on within the whitepaper. If you’re interested in discovering vulnerabilities in Tcl software yourself, then there’s a grand list of references to Tcl-related things at http://www.tcl.tk/resource_dump.html. There is also a USENET newsgroup dedicated to it which is naturally called comp.lang.tcl.

For those of you attending CanSecWest 2011 in Vancouver, we are sponsoring the event. Professionals from Security Objectives will be in attendance to answer your queries regarding Tcl/Tk security or other areas of specialized research (information assurance, software assurance, cloud security, etc.) Of course, our professionals will also be available to field questions regarding Security Objectives’ product and service offerings as well. In addition, CanSecWest 2011 attendees receive special treatment when purchasing licenses for BlockWatch, the complete solution to total cloud security.